Did Adam And Eve Have Moral Knowledge Prior To The Fall?

There’s an objection from internet atheists that God was not
fair to Adam and Eve because He punished them by casting them out of the garden
for eating the fruit from the tree that He had forbidden them to eat from. They
say that Adam and Eve couldn’t have known it was wrong to eat from the tree
since they didn’t have knowledge of good and evil prior to eating from “The
Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil”. Therefore, God was being unfair to them
because He’s punishing them for committing sin when they didn’t even know what
sin was yet.

How do we Christians answer such an objection?

What Would Follow If They
Were In Fact Morally Ignorant?

First off, even if they didn’t have moral knowledge prior to
eating from The Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil, Adam and Eve had no
excuse for their sin against God in the garden. God gave them a warning in
advance of what would happen to them if they ate of the tree, and yet they did
it anyway! God said “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but
you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you
eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:16-17). God told them of
the consequences. But Adam and Eve did not heed God’s warning (see Genesis
3:1-7). Given that Adam and Eve were warned, I don’t think God was being at all
unfair from barring them access to the Garden Of Eden and of the Tree of Life.
Moreover, contrary to what many atheists say, God did not “set Adam and Eve up
to fail”. He did not “entrap” them. Adam and Eve had free will. They could
choose whether or not they ate from the forbidden tree. They had this ability
to choose between those two alternatives even if they had no moral knowledge. The
ones to blame for the fall are Adam and Eve. Not God, and not even Satan, for
all that the serpent could do was tempt them to eat it. He didn’t shove the
fruit down their throats!

For example, even if you didn’t know it was against the law
to jaywalk, you still have the ability to choose either A (jaywalking) or B
(not jaywalking). Your legal knowledge (or lack thereof) doesn’t prevent you from making a genuine free
choice.

Think of this; a father may tell his child not to stick his
finger in the light socket because if he does, he’ll be electrocuted. The child
may not know that it’s morally wrong to disobey his parents, but it’s still his
own fault if he sticks his finger in the electrical socket. You can’t blame the
parent. The parent warned him. In the same way, even if Adam and Eve had no
moral knowledge prior to the fall, God still told them not to do it and warned
them of the consequence. They should have thought “Oh, okay. We won’t do this
because something unpleasant will happen to us.”

Even if they had no moral knowledge prior to the fall, they
were still warned about it, and so are responsible for the consequences of
their actions. Just a child is responsible for himself getting hurt if his
father warns him not to stick his finger in an electrical outlet. The child may not know that
disobeying his father is a sin, but he has still been warned of the
consequences of sticking his finger in an electrical outlet, and you can't blame the dad for his child
getting hurt if he's warned him time after time after time.

Were They Really Morally
Ignorant?

One possibility is that they knew what good and evil
were, they just had no experience of evil. They knew what evil was, they
just had no experiential knowledge of it. Just like how I know what
skydiving is (i.e it’s jumping out of an airplane with a parachute strapped to
your back), but I’ve never known the experience of skydiving. In the same way,
the type of knowledge Adam and Eve had of good and evil was purely
propositional knowledge, but it wasn’t experiential knowledge. It wasn’t the
“knowing what it’s like” kind of knowing. In this case, Adam and Eve knew in
their minds “Sin is going against the will of God. Virtue is being in
accordance with His will.” But they never had the experience of sin. They
neither did anything wrong themselves, nor did anyone do anything wrong to
them.

If this is the case, then God could certainly hold them
accountable for going against His command because they knew what they were
doing.